Oxidation

You missed a couple:

- real whiteboards are just better

- real whiteboards aren't as good as screen sharing

But yes indeed, nothing new has been said on this subject for years.

And apparently they are now doing a face-heel turn and joining the lockout party. Hopefully mine lasts forever, even though I keep feeding it eBay toner!

Stephen Baxter's Phase Space. If those short stories, especially the ones with Reid Malenfant, grab you, then read the Manifold series. If you find yourself wishing it was more Alastair Reynolds, then the Xeelee Sequence.

> Can't leave that bread overnight

Is that a climate thing? In my (temperate) experience, bread lasts for several days, even in summer.

> So 79% of theses houses weren't sold?

Likely they were bought by people who already have houses, as investments.

Your logic, that over-expensive housing won't sell at all, only holds if people are only buying houses that they will live in: to a first approximation, people generally live in just one house.

Not nearly blatant enough if you ask me. I'm still waiting for the Tom Cruise sequel Top Gun: Top Marx.

I think it's about avoiding having them running than turned off at the socket. And I have a countdown timer on heating devices that could be left on and won't automatically turn off after some time like electric grills and heating mats.

> As long as...

Well, exactly.

Also as long as the house wiring is correct, and we all know all domestic electrical jobs are always top-notch¹.

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/cablefail/

Meanwhile I did a fire course and the firefighter running it said "never leave applicances on over night or unattended" (rule 2 after "always close doors").

Not that I always do not do so (the dishwasher and washing machine in particular), but the coming millions of cars drawing double digit kilowatts at night out of domestic electrical systems is probably going to cause a few fires.

Even in the UK, which has quite stringent electric regulations, you can get two-conductor cables with a plastic earth pin (which is always required even if you don't need grounding as otherwise the shutters covering the live and neutral holes are not withdrawn). On the other end, it could have a "figure-of-8" IEC connector.

And I definitely noticed a tingle on some metal laptops even when they have a 3-pin plug and a "Mickey mouse" IEC connector on the cable to the power brick.

I'm always amazed that these products can be so accurately locked to an exact flavour for years, regardless of the inputs, which, being plant or animal matter, can vary a lot naturally between batches and between years.

Not only whisky, even things like branded fruit juice, McDonald's burger meat and salad, Nutella and branded chocolate, coffee, to name just a few, seem almost preternaturally consistent.

Good to know the venerable "credulously repeat what the charismatic technology man said" school of journalism is now well into its second century of utility.

In the vein of fan theories about imaginary events, a favourite of mine was that James Bond died in Blofeld's brain drill chair and the second half of Spectre was hallucinations as his brain shut down.

The release of a subsequent film with the same actor sadly disproved it.

He didn't have more knowledge than we do now, 100 years, trillions of research dollars and millions of engineers later. He had a very amazing and intuitive sense of electricity, mechanics and physics in general, as well as an eidetic memory but it's not like he was conjuring mystical secrets out of the aether, any more than, say, OpenAI is today. And that's about how his inventions were received: with surprise that such things were possible, followed by credulity and wild predictions over where it might go, mostly relayed by people who didn't understand the technology.

Electricity simply doesn't provide a practical mass destructive capacity in the way that, say, the strong nuclear force does. However, from the breakneck rate of electrical technology from the 1890s onwards, you could see why an extrapolation of those capabilities could make it plausible that it could eventually get there.

Isn't water one is the canonical examples of a natural monopoly?

Much "journalism" isn't journalism at all, it's just content aggregation and maybe a paraphrasing. In the case of anything remotely technical, this will probably also include dumbing down to the point of uselessness, if not outright incorrectness.

I assume it's only a matter of time before someone plugs something similar into Wikidata and rather than using AI to generate facts statistically, look the specifics up where known.

0N0E, maybe (Null Island)? Depending on if latitude and longitude count as coded or not.

Otherwise "Burj tip" could be quite good (centimetres).

The Martian "timeslip" in Red Mars works exactly kind this, if I recall. I assume that's a reference to the Philip K. Dick novel of the same name.

Especially when servicing interest on debt (the I) isn't nearly as cheap as it used to be, unless the debt is locked in at a lower interest rate. Even if it is, but the term ends, a rosy-sounding EBITDA can turn ugly.

> It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single species in possession of a good technological base and a will to survive, must be in want of a interplanetary kinetic asteroid redirection system.

Workers always earn less than the value they make for a useful business under capitalism (and that's before taxes, which don't necessarily require or imply capitalism). There's always a point where a cost to a worker exceeds the value to that worker, but doesn't exceed the value to society of facilitating that worker's labour.

There are edge cases, but in general inhibiting the ability of workers to work (e.g. by making it expensive to get there, or expensive live near enough to the work, fail to allow them to be healthy enough to do the work, make it hard to take care of children while working, restrict access to or quality of education etc) is not good for a society built on work.

> create much hard to capture value.

This is pretty key.

Imagine a train line that allows commuters to get to work. Trains are expensive to run, so the actual cost to get a commuter to work and back is £100. The commuters are paid (say) £150 a day, after tax. Is this train worth 2/3 of their post-tax income? Probably not, so they won't use it, and the company can't get workers if there's no other practical way to commute. Workers can take less good jobs near home, earn less, but take home more. Or even no job at all. However, a worker generates substantially more than their post-tax salary in value to the economy as a whole, so subsidy of the train fare creates value by getting them to work and generating that value, even though the train cannot actually turn a profit itself by charging the commuters out of their income.

Even if you say "well the company should just pay more if they've made that value", not all that value manifests directly on the company's bottom line, it includes downstream value, as well as intangible things like worker skills that are more of an abstract societal benefit.

In the same way, roads produce massively more value than people would be willing to pay individually: all the food deliveries in a week might be worth, at retail, about £4 billion, say. If those deliveries can't be made, what will be the cost? £4 billion? Or more because the whole country will become a much less effective economy when everyone is starving and looking for food? And the universal-delivery postal system. Healthcare, childcare, energy, etc etc.

As Stephen Jay Gould said: "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."

I'm curious if (and if so, how) these startups think they're going to survive when the supertankers of the large auto companies complete their miles-long turn and start production at the scale they do ICEs now. The scrappy first-mover advantage will only go so far.

Or are they just angling to be bought up by the big boys as an exit?

I talked to a heart surgeon in his late 50s about 10 years ago. "Who knows, we'll all probably live to 100!" I said, lightheartedly (don't remember the exact context).

"No", he said, "my generation might, yours is too unfit, too young, to live that long".

"Harder than I think" reminds me of https://xkcd.com/883/ because starting a business already sounds like the hardest thing I'd ever have attempted.

For sure, same as the Culture, but with more existential and body horror. RS (and the Culture) also have a bad habit of hopping across the universe in space, time which would badly disjoint a single series. They're more like Star Trek with separate series each.

But just imagine the Chasm we could have! Would look so good.

I do respect the recognition that leveling up the protagonist every installment eventually leads to godlike beings fighting each other at a level that humans would be vapourised by mere proximity.

The Dresden Files, say, appears to be running out of headroom for Dresden to be able to throw down without actually wiping Chicago from the map permanently.

I really dislike the covers of Hyperion depicting the Shrike. Seems like something that should be left to the imagination in the context of the book format.

Ooh, yes that could be very good, and the age-of-sail/steampunk aesthetic would be a nice change from the usual gleaming-Imperial-navy/raggedy-Rebel-cowboy space look (Star Wars, Firefly, etc).

The Revelation Space series would be very interesting, but it would need an excellent director to bring home the brutal malevolence of that universe (and paging HR Geiger for the Melding Plague scenes).